Simon Rattle conducts Tippett’s “A Child of Our Time” Simon Rattle conducts Tippett’s “A Child of Our Time” The Last Days of Socrates for bass baritone, choir and orchestra (01:00:16) Sir John Tomlinson Bass, Rundfunkchor Berlin, Simon Halsey Chorus Master Michael Tippett A Child of Our Time (01:09:57) Sally Matthews Soprano, Sarah Connolly Contralto, Matthew Polenzani Tenor, Sir John Tomlinson Bass, Rundfunkchor Berlin, Simon Halsey Chorus Master free Brett Dean: Composing Socrates (00:14:40) free Artist biographies From Berliner Philharmoniker musician to internationally renowned composer – that’s Brett Dean’s career in a nutshell. In the process of arranging and improvising, the Australian-born violist discovered the composer in himself. His clarinet concerto Ariel’s Music, chosen for the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers, and the ballet One of a Kind brought him international renown. Encouraged by their success, Dean decided in 2000 to devote himself principally to composition.

Ties to his old orchestra have nonetheless remained intact. Berlin audiences may well remember his orchestral work Komarov’s Fall, which the Philharmoniker commissioned. That makes it all the more gratifying that yet another new work by Brett is given its first performance at this concert. Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time, by contrast, was not commissioned. The English composer felt compelled by a real-life event to write it in protest against dictatorship and racism. In 1938 a 17-year-old boy, Herschel Grynszpan, was provoked by the anti-Semitic treatment of his family to shoot a secretary at the German embassy in Paris. The attack provided the Nazis with a pretext for the pogrom in Germany known as Kristallnacht. Tippett’s musical treatment of the Grynszpan incident follows the oratorio concept of Bach and Handel. Ever since the work brought about his artistic breakthrough in 1944, Tippett has taken his place alongside Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten as one of the leading English composers of the 20th century.

From the Last Days of Socrates to the “Twentieth-Century Blues” Dean’s The Last Days of Socrates and Tippett’s A Child of Our Time Sir Michael Tippett was a committed pacifist. He joined the British peace movement in 1934, intensively studied the writings of Mahatma Gandhi and was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment as a conscientious objector in June 1943. In his oratorio A Child of Our Time, which he composed in reaction to the incidents surrounding the Nazi pogrom in November 1938, the composer took a stand against the events of his day and vigorously opposed all forms of violence, oppression and discrimination. Critical references to political and contemporary events are also found in Brett Dean’s oeuvre, for example, in the orchestral work Ceremonial, Dean’s personal protest against the war in Iraq.

In his string quartet Eclipse, the Australian composer responded to the Tampa crisis, which occurred in the Indian Ocean in August 2001 – a conflict that arose as a result of the hard-line stance of the Australian government against the boat people who tried to reach Australian territorial waters and were rescued at sea by the crew of the Norwegian freighter Tampa. Dean’s Pastoral Symphony for chamber orchestra and tape, on the other hand, focuses on the contrast between unspoiled nature and environmental pollution in Queensland – the Australian state in whose capital, Brisbane, the composer was born in 1961. Brett Dean: The Last Days of Socrates Dean’s latest work, composed in 2012 for bass-baritone, chorus and orchestra, was commissioned by the Rundfunkchor Berlin, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. As the title indicates, the three-part composition deals with the ancient philosopher Socrates, who lived during the age of Athenian democracy. Like every Athenian, he took an active interest in political life, spent a great deal of time in the agora and other public places and involved his fellow citizens in discussions during which he critically questioned human thinking and behaviour.

In 399 BC Socrates was accused of heresy by his enemies (there was no freedom of expression on religious matters in ancient Greece!) – an accusation with which conservative Athenians had for decades persecuted people who, in their opinion, undermined the traditional social fabric of the city by questioning conventional ways of thinking. The fact that the philosopher was actually sentenced to death by a court of jurors is still a source of controversy today. During the voting procedure, jury members cast one of two different kinds of coins – one with a hole and one without – into a terracotta vessel; Dean uses this sound twice in his score, calling for three tuned terracotta bowls to be played by two of the percussionists. Graeme William Ellis wrote the libretto for The Last Days of Socrates on the basis of texts from Plato’s dialogues. In addition to the Apology of Socrates, the Australian poet drew primarily on texts in which Plato shares the last phase of the popular teacher’s life with his readers: the Crito and the Phaedo.

Ellis established a link between the first recorded legal scandal in human history and the present, however, by incorporating a quote from the contemporary Chinese artist, dissident and human rights activist Ai Weiwei in the second movement: “Liberty is about our rights to question everything.” The composition begins with a Prelude appealing to the goddess Athena. The movement opens with an introduction based on mysterious veils of sound and pedal points, in which distant solo violins provide surreal, whirring string harmonics. The pivotal second section, Apology, is devoted to Socrates’ defence before the court. In Plato’s account, the philosopher reduces the charges to absurdity, declaring that he was only accused because he pointed out the Athenians’ mistakes and weaknesses, thus angering them. During the third section (Phaedo), in which Dean calls for a small chorus of offstage sopranos, Socrates’ students Crito and Phaedo are present in the prison at the moment when their esteemed teacher drinks the cup of poison. Socrates remains true to the position taken in Plato’s earlier work, Gorgias, that it is better to suffer injustice than to do wrong yourself – he had ruled out escape from the very beginning, since it would violate the law.

One last time Socrates emphasizes that only his body will die, whereas his soul is immortal, so he will not depart this life with sorrow or fear. The music is in the piano range throughout; after isolated choral interjections over a string soundscape punctuated with string harmonics, it fades away with an ascending vocalise glissando by the offstage sopranos. Michael Tippett: A Child of Our Time The title of Tippett’s oratorio is taken from Ödön von Horváth’s 1938 novel Ein Kind unserer Zeit. The text is by the composer himself, although Tippett had sent T. S. Eliot (whom he referred to as his “spiritual father”) his own draft libretto, which the poet returned to him with the “unexpected advice” that Tippett complete it himself.

“The work,” wrote the composer, “began to come together with the sounds of the shot itself – prophetic of the imminent gunfire of the war – and the shattering of glass in the Kristallnacht.” During his work Tippett realized that he had reached the “turning-point in my compositional output, both in terms of technique – I had learnt how to handle an extended dramatic form – and in subject matter: for now at last I had found my true role in singing those twentieth-century blues.” A Child of Our Time follows the three-part structure of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah.

Tippett also paid tribute to Johann Sebastian Bach, both with musical quotations and by inserting “chorales” – Negro spirituals which, according to the composer, “act as modern chorales, in that we all are moved by them beyond the power of the tunes as mere music, yet the spirituals themselves have turned and twisted Bible language into a modern dialect; the stories they tell of the Bible Jews are used to comfort Negroes in the bitterness of oppression, and I use these Negro spirituals to symbolize the agony of modern Jews in Hitler’s Europe.” At the same time, the oratorio is dedicated to anyone who is “rejected, cast out from the centre of our society onto the fringes: into slums, into concentration camps, into ghettos.” The first part of the work describes the general state of oppression; part II “presents the particular story of a young man’s attempt to seek justice by violence and the catastrophic consequences; while part III considers the moral to be drawn, if any.” The premiere of A Child of our Time, which took place in London on 19 March 1944, brought the work long-term success which has continued to this day.

“It is probably every composer’s dream,” Tippett wrote in his 1991 autobiography Those TwentiethCentury Blues, “that something he or she has written will reach an audience in the world at large. In my case, A Child of Our Time really does seem to have spoken its message in most parts of the globe.” Harald Hodeige TIPPETT: A Child of Our Time | HDtracks - The World's Greatest-Sounding Music Downloads 130481 TIPPETT: A Child of Our Time 11.98 USD InStock /Classical/20th Century Classical Michael Tippett was one of the most gifted and most inspiring figures in twentieth-century British musical life. He was born on 2nd January 1905 in London, but grew up in a village in the East Anglian county of Suffolk and at a succession of boarding... Michael Tippett was one of the most gifted and most inspiring figures in twentieth-century British musical life. He was born on 2nd January 1905 in London, but grew up in a village in the East Anglian county of Suffolk and at a succession of boarding schools.

Because his parents lived most of the time on the Continent, he travelled extensively in Europe, acquiring facility in languages and an unusually international outlook. Childhood piano lessons and concert-going prompted the ambition of becoming a composer, which was furthered by study at the Royal College of Music in London between 1923 and 1928, and later by private lessons with R.O. Morris. During the 1930s Tippett lived in the Surrey countryside south of London, earning a frugal living from teaching, and becoming involved in left-wing politics. He withheld most of his compositions of that period: his earliest published works are his First String Quartet, completed in 1935 (and in fact rewritten eight years later), and the first of his four Piano Sonatas, composed in 1936�38. Early in the Second World War, Tippett was appointed Director of Music at Morley College, an adult education institute in south London; he was to hold the post until 1951, conducting the Morley Choir in numerous concerts of early and new music.

A lifelong pacifist, he was imprisoned for three months in 1943 as a conscientious objector, but his stock as a composer rose gradually, through performances and broadcasts of works including his Concerto for Double String Orchestra and A Child of Our Time. These established his individual compositional voice, with traditional forms modelled on those of Beethoven filled out in contrapuntal textures � line against line as opposed to chord after chord � and melodies animated by lithe syncopated or irregular rhythms, suggested equally by Stravinsky, sixteenth-century madrigals and jazz.<br /> <br /> After the War Tippett became well known not only as a conductor but also as a broadcaster on musical and cultural topics; meanwhile, he was working for several years on the first of his five operas, The Midsummer Marriage, which eventually reached the stage in 1955. This and two satellite works of the 1950s, the Piano Concerto and the Second Symphony, marked a peak of rich, exuberant invention in his music.

In the early 1960s, he adopted more austere textures, complemented by mosaic-like construction, in such works as the opera King Priam, the Concerto for Orchestra and the short oratorio The Vision of St Augustine. Despite turning sixty in 1965, and being knighted the following year, Tippett remained apart from the Establishment, retaining his iconoclastic youthfulness of manner, and delighting in collaborations with young players and performances to young audiences. He became especially popular in the United States: his visits there brought a new swathe of influences, from both American classical music and popular culture, into such works of the 1970s as the operas The Knot Garden and The Ice Break and the Third Symphony; and American commissions or cocommissions in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in his Fourth and last Symphony, his evening-long choral work The Mask of Time, and his last opera New Year. Something of Tippett�s early lyricism returned in his later works, which also include a Triple Concerto, the last of his five String Quartets, and his farewell to composition, The Rose Lake for orchestra.

In his autobiography, Those Twentieth Century Blues, Tippett declared with characteristic optimism �My real hope is to see in the new millennium�; but he died in 1998, six days after his 93rd birthday.<br /> <br /> Tippett wrote his oratorio A Child of Our Time between 1939 and 1941; its first performance, at the Royal Adelphi Theatre in London in March 1944, was one of the outstanding artistic events in the capital during the War. As later with all his operas, he wrote his own text; at one stage, he asked the great poet T.S. Eliot to write it, but on seeing his draft outline Eliot advised Tippett to complete it himself, as anything he might write would be so overtly poetic as to get in the way of the music.

The work was inspired by an incident which took place in Paris in November 1938: a seventeen-yearold Polish Jew, a refugee whose family had been arrested by the Gestapo and stranded with thousands of others at the Polish frontier, and who was himself being sheltered illegally in France by his uncle and aunt, shot and killed a diplomat at the German Legation. He was tried and imprisoned by the French authorities; and the Nazis, by way of reprisal for the killing, launched one of their most savage pogroms in Germany and Austria, the notorious �Kristallnacht�. Tippett�s libretto does not simply narrate these events, but views them at one remove, from the standpoint of a non-believer, a convinced pacifist, and an admirer of the writings of the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. Its central theme is the need for each individual to come to terms with his or her own evil side, rather than project it on to an enemy � because the two sides of the personality are complementary, and both necessary, like winter and spring, darkness and light.

This is stated most clearly in the unexpectedly hopeful passage in Part Three in which the tenor soloist and then the chorus sing: �I would know my shadow and my light, so shall I at last be whole.�<br /> <br /> The music of A Child of Our Time similarly reconciles and integrates apparent opposites. The overall form of the work, the composer himself said, recalls the tripartite arrangement of Handel�s Messiah, in which the first part consists of �great but general prophecies�, the second of narrative, and the third of �commentary and judgment�. Within this framework, there are more specific reminiscences of Handel�s oratorios and of Bach�s Passion settings, in such things as the dual r�les of the soloists as characters in the drama and commentators, the choral �crowd scenes�, among them the double chorus of persecutors and persecuted in Part Two, the frequent use of fugal texture, the constantly varying instrumental colours of successive numbers or sections, and most obviously the familiar first-inversion chords which herald the solo bass�s passages of narrative recitative.

But the musical language of the work is by no means pastiche: it is Tippett�s own, recognisably English, especially in its madrigal-like adherence to the natural stresses of the words against the underlying pulse, and coloured by echoes of jazz and popular music such as the tango rhythm of the tenor�s �I have no money for my bread�. These go halfway to meet one of the most striking features of the work, the Negro spirituals which are introduced from time to time to comment on the actions and emotions of the drama, in the same way as the Lutheran chorales in Bach�s Passions.

The spirituals are included as the songs of the victims of oppression in another generation and on another continent, and through their very familiarity they emphasize the relevance to us of the events Tippett describes and comments on: more than sixty years later, the anguished boy is still �a child of our time�.<br /> <br /> Anthony Burton 11.98 City of Birmingham Orchestra 20th Century Classical 2013-10-20 Michael Tippett Biography - Childhood, Life And Timeline Musicians Michael Tippett Biography Sir Michael Kemp Tippett was a prolific British composer of the 20th century, a humanitarian and a pacifist Find out information on Michael Tippettâs childhood, life and timeline in this biography. Quick Facts 1976 - Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society 1959 - CBE 1966 - knighthood Image Credit Sir Michael Kemp Tippett was a prolific British composer of the 20th century, a humanitarian and a pacifist.

The entire gamut of his work comprises of five operas, four symphonies, five string quartets, numerous songs and choral settings, four piano sonatas, orchestral works like the âTriple Concertoâ, and works for voices and orchestra such as âThe Vision of Saint Augustine,â etc. Tippet was imprisoned for three month for being a conscientious objector during the Second World War. He was also one of the first gay composers, who confessed his sexual orientation in public and used his music to explore the issues of sexuality.Though the libretti of his operas, which he often wrote himself, he faced stern criticism. However, that hardly deterred him from expressing his ideas or political thoughts through his works. Throughout his lifetime, he remained an avid learner of music. As a conductor, he recorded many of his own works. Michael Tippett’s Childhood And Early Life Sir Michael Kemp Tippett was born on 2 January in the year 1905 in the city of London in an affluent family.

His father, Henry William Tippett, was a lawyer and an entrepreneur and his mother, Isabel Clementina Binny Kemp, was a charity worker, a member of the labor party and a suffragette. His inclination towards music was evident from the very childhood. Tippet won a scholarship and went to study at Fettes College, but when his liaison with another boy transpired, his parents moved him to Stamford School in Lincolnshire where he completed the rest of his school education. There he learned piano and harmony from Frances Tinkler. His first experience of modern music was on hearing Ravel's Mother Goose suite at a concert in Leicester conducted by Malcolm Sargent. From that day onwards, he yearned to be a composer. During the First World War, his family was confronted with a financial exigency, which obliged them to lead an unsettled life moving around Europe. Tippet joined his parents in vacations. Due to Tippet’s atheistic and rebellious demeanor, his headmaster asked him to be removed from the school premises and to be lodged somewhere else in the town. During this time, he bought a copy of Stanford’s musical composition and started teaching himself.

Tippet then went on to study at the Royal College of Music in the year 1923. He learned his first lessons in composition from Charles Wood. After the death of Wood, Tippet went to learn music from Dr. C.H. Kitson. However, there were certain discords between the teacher and the student regarding the style and had to quit. He also gained some working knowledge of the orchestra and conducting. At the RCM, he spent five years and graduated in 1928, taking five instead of four years as he failed in his first attempt. Personal Life Though Tippet confessed his homosexuality at a very young age, yet the fear of being ostracized from normal life haunted him. He enchanted both women and man equally with his looks and charm. Throughout his life, he held close relationships with many women. Evelyn Maude, an amateur cellist, was deeply enamored by Tippet and played a role of an elder sister in his life. When Allison, a musician and musicologist with whom he even contemplated adopting a child once committed suicide at the end of World War II, Tippet was left shattered and aggrieved.

However, not until Wilfred Franks, a young painter, entered his life, Tippet felt the pangs of real and passionate love. On his relationship with Frank, Tippett once said, “the deepest, most shattering experience of falling in love,” and “a major factor underlying the discovery of my own individual musical 'voice'.” Career Tippet was offered to conduct a concert and operatic society in Oxted, Surrey. Thus, in a quest to find solitude to compose, away from the bustling city of London, he fled to placid rural environment. In 1929, he rented a small cottage on the North Downs, formed a madrigal group, and became a music teacher at a local school. Soon with his father’s aid, he constructed a bungalow for himself at Limpsfield. Tippet then went on to produce a number of stage works, one of which was his own version of the 18th century ballad ‘The Village Opera’. Tippett's own music started featuring in Oxted programmes and in April 1930, he held a concert, which was devoted solely to his own compositions. To brush up his skills further, he went to study with R.

O. Morris, who had already taught Tippett at the RCM and was considered to be specialist of 16th century polyphony.Thistraining turned out to be particularly fruitful for him as he was able to emulate the Bach’s style of writing figures. Later Days Tippett was overwhelmed by injustice and oppression, which was taking place in Europe those days.Driven by a strong feeling of empathy, Tippet started fusing his music with radicalized political actions. He then left the teaching job and opted for the conductorship of a number of amateur choirs. The year 1939 witnessed the commencement of his first magnum opus “A Child of Our Time,” which can be said to be the outcome of his crystallized atheistic ideas, which took shape during the course of several informal rendezvous with the Nobel laureate T.S. Eliot whom he often referred to as his spiritual father. “A Child of Our Time” was based on a real incident in which a boy victim of injustice retorted back with violence, an action which then went on to beget much greater violence. The work was completed in 1941 and was performed in 1944 for the first time.

Tippett always strived to express universal feeling about such occurrences and his choice of Negro Spirituals achieved the desired dramatic effect. Tippett’s radical political stand was further fostered when Francesca Allinson introduced him to the Marxist composer Alan Bush, who was the conductor of the London Labor Choral Union. Tippett conducted the orchestra at the Pageant of Labour at the Crystal Palace on 15–20 October 1934. As Tippett strongly championed the idea of individual freedom and reprobated the existence of any tyrannous authority, he chose Trotsky's internationalism over Stalin's rigidly controlled and centralized state. He joined the Communist Party in 1935, but left in the wake of an overpowering clout of Stalinist ideologies. In the same year, Tippett wrote an agitprop play, ‘War Ramp’, about the role of public credit in the financing of war whose argument though seemed to spur the idea of convulsive revolution was denied by him and later started resorting to the idea of pacifism. Trapped between the Scylla of Nazism and Charybdis of Stalinism, Tippett became one of the thousands to take up the pledge of Rev.

Dick Sheppard, which then resulted in a peace pledge union of which Tippett became the president eventually. In 1943, he was sentenced to three months imprisonment for refusing, as a pacifist, to comply with conditions of exemption from active war servicebut his loyalty towards pacifist ideology remained unaffected. In 1960, he moved away from Sussex and went to live in Wiltshire, first in the village of Corsham, and then on Derry Hill above the town of Calne. In the year 1965, he visited the United States, where his music won advocates and audiences, and Tippett in turn introduced elements of American slang and music into his own work, for example in The Knot Garden, first performed in 1970. Awards And Achievements In 1966, he was knighted, and awarded the Order of Merit in 1983. He remained very active composing and conducting. His opera, ‘New Year’ premiered in 1989, which didn’t get a warm reception. ‘Byzantium’, a piece for soprano and orchestra, was premièred in 1991.

“Those Twentieth Century Blues”, the autobiography of Tippett was published in 1991. His Fifth String Quartet was premièred in 1992. In 1995, Tippett was honored on his 90th birthday with special events in Britain, Canada and the US, including the première of his final work, The Rose Lake. In that year a collection of his essays, “Tippett on Music”, also came out. In 1996, Tippett moved from Wiltshire to London for health concerns. Death And Legacy In 1979, Tippett set up The Michael Tippett Musical Foundation, a charitable trust that owed its initial income to the sale of most of his autographed manuscripts to the British Library. In 1997, when he was visiting Stockholm for a retrospective of his concert music, he developed pneumonia and was brought home to England, where he died in early 1998. Composers like Mark-Anthony Turnage, David Matthews, William Mathias and Edward Cowie have admitted the influence of Tippet on their work.

A Child of Our Time (1944) The Knot Garden (1970) TIPPETT, M.: Child of Our Time (A) (F. Robinson, S. Walker, J. Garrison, J. Cheek, City of Birmingham Symphony, Tippett) Sir Michael Tippett (1905–1998) A Child of Our Time Michael Tippett was one of the most gifted and most inspiring figures in twentieth-century British musical life. He was born on 2nd January 1905 in London, but grew up in a village in the East Anglian county of Suffolk and at a succession of boarding schools. Because his parents lived most of the time on the Continent, he travelled extensively in Europe, acquiring facility in languages and an unusually international outlook. Childhood piano lessons and concert-going prompted the ambition of becoming a composer, which was furthered by study at the Royal College of Music in London between 1923 and 1928, and later by private lessons with R.O. Morris.

During the 1930s Tippett lived in the Surrey countryside south of London, earning a frugal living from teaching, and becoming involved in left-wing politics. He withheld most of his compositions of that period: his earliest published works are his First String Quartet, completed in 1935 (and in fact rewritten eight years later), and the first of his four Piano Sonatas, composed in 1936–38. Early in the Second World War, Tippett was appointed Director of Music at Morley College, an adult education institute in south London; he was to hold the post until 1951, conducting the Morley Choir in numerous concerts of early and new music. A lifelong pacifist, he was imprisoned for three months in 1943 as a conscientious objector, but his stock as a composer rose gradually, through performances and broadcasts of works including his Concerto for Double String Orchestra and A Child of Our Time.

These established his individual compositional voice, with traditional forms modelled on those of Beethoven filled out in contrapuntal textures – line against line as opposed to chord after chord – and melodies animated by lithe syncopated or irregular rhythms, suggested equally by Stravinsky, sixteenth-century madrigals and jazz. After the War Tippett became well known not only as a conductor but also as a broadcaster on musical and cultural topics; meanwhile, he was working for several years on the first of his five operas, The Midsummer Marriage, which eventually reached the stage in 1955. This and two satellite works of the 1950s, the Piano Concerto and the Second Symphony, marked a peak of rich, exuberant invention in his music. In the early 1960s, he adopted more austere textures, complemented by mosaic-like construction, in such works as the opera King Priam, the Concerto for Orchestra and the short oratorio The Vision of St Augustine.

Despite turning sixty in 1965, and being knighted the following year, Tippett remained apart from the Establishment, retaining his iconoclastic youthfulness of manner, and delighting in collaborations with young players and performances to young audiences. He became especially popular in the United States: his visits there brought a new swathe of influences, from both American classical music and popular culture, into such works of the 1970s as the operas The Knot Garden and The Ice Break and the Third Symphony; and American commissions or cocommissions in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in his Fourth and last Symphony, his evening-long choral work The Mask of Time, and his last opera New Year. Something of Tippett’s early lyricism returned in his later works, which also include a Triple Concerto, the last of his five String Quartets, and his farewell to composition, The Rose Lake for orchestra. In his autobiography, Those Twentieth Century Blues, Tippett declared with characteristic optimism ‘My real hope is to see in the new millennium’; but he died in 1998, six days after his 93rd birthday.

Tippett wrote his oratorio A Child of Our Time between 1939 and 1941; its first performance, at the Royal Adelphi Theatre in London in March 1944, was one of the outstanding artistic events in the capital during the War. As later with all his operas, he wrote his own text; at one stage, he asked the great poet T.S. Eliot to write it, but on seeing his draft outline Eliot advised Tippett to complete it himself, as anything he might write would be so overtly poetic as to get in the way of the music. The work was inspired by an incident which took place in Paris in November 1938: a seventeen-yearold Polish Jew, a refugee whose family had been arrested by the Gestapo and stranded with thousands of others at the Polish frontier, and who was himself being sheltered illegally in France by his uncle and aunt, shot and killed a diplomat at the German Legation. He was tried and imprisoned by the French authorities; and the Nazis, by way of reprisal for the killing, launched one of their most savage pogroms in Germany and Austria, the notorious ‘Kristallnacht’.

Tippett’s libretto does not simply narrate these events, but views them at one remove, from the standpoint of a non-believer, a convinced pacifist, and an admirer of the writings of the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. Its central theme is the need for each individual to come to terms with his or her own evil side, rather than project it on to an enemy – because the two sides of the personality are complementary, and both necessary, like winter and spring, darkness and light. This is stated most clearly in the unexpectedly hopeful passage in Part Three in which the tenor soloist and then the chorus sing: ‘I would know my shadow and my light, so shall I at last be whole.’ The music of A Child of Our Time similarly reconciles and integrates apparent opposites. The overall form of the work, the composer himself said, recalls the tripartite arrangement of Handel’s Messiah, in which the first part consists of ‘great but general prophecies’, the second of narrative, and the third of ‘commentary and judgment’.

Within this framework, there are more specific reminiscences of Handel’s oratorios and of Bach’s Passion settings, in such things as the dual rôles of the soloists as characters in the drama and commentators, the choral ‘crowd scenes’, among them the double chorus of persecutors and persecuted in Part Two, the frequent use of fugal texture, the constantly varying instrumental colours of successive numbers or sections, and most obviously the familiar first-inversion chords which herald the solo bass’s passages of narrative recitative. But the musical language of the work is by no means pastiche: it is Tippett’s own, recognisably English, especially in its madrigal-like adherence to the natural stresses of the words against the underlying pulse, and coloured by echoes of jazz and popular music such as the tango rhythm of the tenor’s ‘I have no money for my bread’. These go halfway to meet one of the most striking features of the work, the Negro spirituals which are introduced from time to time to comment on the actions and emotions of the drama, in the same way as the Lutheran chorales in Bach’s Passions.

The spirituals are included as the songs of the victims of oppression in another generation and on another continent, and through their very familiarity they emphasize the relevance to us of the events Tippett describes and comments on: more than sixty years later, the anguished boy is still ‘a child of our time’. Anthony Burton Michael Tippett: Nobody Knows (A Child of Our Time)- Reading Phoenix Choir - YouTube Michael Tippett: Nobody Knows (A Child of Our Time)- Reading Phoenix Choir Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Oct 16, 2013 A Child of Our Time is a secular oratorio by the British composer Michael Tippett (1905--1998), who also wrote the libretto. Composed between 1939 and 1941, it was first performed at the Adelphi Theatre, London, on 19 March 1944.

The work was inspired by events that affected Tippett profoundly: the assassination in 1938 of a German diplomat by a young Jewish refugee, and the Nazi government's reaction in the form of a vicious pogrom against its Jewish population—the so-called Kristallnacht.(From Wikipedia) Recorded by an audience member (and used with permission) at Douai Abbey in April 2013. Conducted by David Crown. Category A SIXTIETH GARLAND OF BRITISH LIGHT MUSIC COMPOSERS Editor-in-Chief: Rob Barnett A SIXTIETH GARLAND OF BRITISH LIGHT MUSIC COMPOSERS For this "diamond" instalment we resume our survey of what may be reckoned as the "Big Six" of British 20th Century composers. Elgar has been dealt with in detail.

We move to SIR MICHAEL TIPPETT (1905-98), one whose output is overwhelmingly serious but even he may be reckoned as a purvey or light music: two examples of the light, or lightish, concert suite, the Suite For the Birthday of Prince Charles (1948) and, written for the Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra, the Shires Suite (1965-70), plus the arrangements of Negro spirituals he made for his oratorio A Child of Our Time and later extracted as a concert item. Tippett would perhaps be surprised to find himself in a survey of this kind. Perhaps even EDWARD BENJAMIN BRITTEN later LORD BRITTEN OF ALDEBURGH (1913-76) would be similarly taken aback, but he was a very complete musician, pianist and conductor as well as composer and very prolific. For many he is the greatest British composer of the 20th Century.

Among his lighter pieces we may point most obviously to the two Suites after Rossini, Soirees Musicales (1936) and Matinees Musicales (1941), originally intended for the ballet. Some, at any rate of his folk song arrangements would sit comfortably in a programme of British light music, as would his cabaret songs to words by W.H. Auden, composed over virtually the whole of his adult composing life (eg. Tell Me the Truth About Love and Funeral Blues). Much of his incidental music for stage (eg for J.B. Priestley's Johnson Over Jordan) and film (eg for Love From a Stranger and the celebrated documentary Night Mail) may be reckoned as light music and a case could be made for the suite of Spanish dances, Mont Juic, assembled with Lennox Berkeley, for any of the movements of the early Simple Symphony for strings and for at least some of the ballet score The Prince of the Pagodas. I recall that the English Opera Group's publishing for three performances of Paul Bunyan in Doncaster in 1976 described it as a "musical".

The Doncaster theatre going public did not swallow it, though, and no-one came, but the tunes are certainly good. Oddly, Britten, unlike Holst, Vaughan Williams, Ireland, Bliss or Elgar, wrote nothing for military or brass band. Talking of Holst, GUSTAV THEODORE VON HOLST (1874-1934) used , as did his great friend and contemporary Ralph Vaughan Williams, English folk song in the service of light music, although both composers had other musical influences besides folk song. Examples found in his two suites for the National Championships in 1928 (his daughter Imogen said that he preferred writing for brass rather than military bands because he found the sound to be mellower and more flexible, but he composed only that one piece for the brass medium (other hands supplied arrangements of the military band suites for brass). To these suites, we may add the St. Paul's and Brook Green suites for string orchestra, intended originally for the talented girl pupils of St.

Paul's School, Hammersmith, where Holst taught, and p[perhaps the ballet music, from his opera The Perfect Fool (1921), the Golden Goose ballet for chorus and orchestra and the Two Songs Without Words (Country Song and the rousing Marching Song). He also arranged for strings the middle movements (Nocturne) from the Moorside Suite; and one or two of his handful of pieces, for solo piano may be reckoned as light music. Delius, baptised Fritz Albert Theodor but generally known as FREDERICK DELIUS (1862-1934) was born in Bradford but drew musical inspiration generally from places far from Bradford. Few, if any of his sensitive native-inspired poems really rank as light music and few of his songs, despite the tunefulness of many of them, regarded as ballads.

However he did make a number of contributions to the light music repertoire, mostly early in date: the Florida Suite of 1887 ("La Calinda" from this was later incorporated into Delius' opera Koanga and in an orchestral arrangement became a standby of light orchestras), Sleigh Ride (1888) and the March Caprice (1889), perhaps also the Air and Dance (1915) for strings, the Intermezzo and Serenade from the incidental music for Hassan (1920), the Caprice and Elegy for cello and orchestra (1925) and some keyboard miniatures. We come finally in this Garland to RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS, another who is regarded as one of the greatest British composers of the 20th Century. Dotted between his choral music, symphonies, concertos and so on are many examples of light music. Like Holst, he drew on English folk and traditional melody in the cause of light music.

His first work to receive a major performance, the Serenade in A Minor (1897, played at Bournemouth in 1901) probably falls within the "light" category as so several other of his suites, the Charterhouse Suite, based on an early piano miniatures (1923), the Suite de Ballet for flute and piano (1913/20), The Running Set, based on traditional dance tunes (1933) and the music for his 1923 ballet Old King Cole (Job, also a ballet, more or less, is more serious). On many occasions VW was asked many times to write incidental music, for stage radio and screen and at times this was re-worked, by him or others, into a suite, perhaps a single movement for the concert hall, as happened must notably with the music for a production in Cambridge of Aristophanes' The Wasps (1909, concert suite 1912), whose overture is one of the finest of British Overtures. The Prelude on an Old Carol Tune (1950) was based on music for a BBC radio adaptation of Hardy's novel 'The Mayor of Casterbridge'.

The incidental music he provided for five Shakespeare plays at Stratford in 1953 was not adapted for the concert room. He came to films during World War II, after people like Herbert Bath, Bliss and Walton had flexed their muscles in the studios. Once started, the roll-call of his films is quite impressive: 49th Parallel (1941), with its expansive Prelude, Coastal Command (1942), which yielded a seven movement concert suite, The People's Land (1943), Flemish Farm (1943), which also was turned into a seven piece suite, Stricken Peninsular (1945), The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947: not adapted for the concert hall but records of the music, presumably from the sound-track, were released), Scott of the Antarctic (1948, adapted as the Sinfonia Antarctica), Dim Little Island (1949), Bitter Springs (1950) and The England of Elizabeth (1957, which finished, posthumously as, Three Portraits and Two Shakespearean Sketches). V.W.

quite quickly followed Holst into writing for military band, his output in that direction coming mainly in 1923-4: a March, Sea Songs, the crisp Toccata Marziale, written for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 and, best known of all, the English Folk Song Suite, quickly adapted for orchestra and brass band by Gordon Jacob. Apart from the brass band version of Sea Songs, he was not to write for brass band until the 1950s when he composed Three Welsh Hymn Tunes (1955, for the Salvation Army) and, adopted the test piece for the National Championships of 1957 and including parts for two B Flat baritone saxes, the Variations for Brass Band. One can go on. Not many of Vaughan William's songs, are reckonable as ballads, but the lyric, the time and the general feel of Linden Lea, first performed in 1902, surely makes it such. Arrangements of Greensleeves have been legion in light music programmes down the years but there is none finer than Vaughan Williams Fantasia therein, arguably his most heard single movement.

He had the gift of touching the hearts of many with his quintessentially British music and it is scarcely surprising that he provided so much for British (and perhaps other) light orchestras. © Phil Scowcroft 1999

Question: Which British composer wrote 'A Child Of Our Time' incorporating Negro spirituals, in 1941?
Answer: MICHAEL TIPPETT